The word is out. Google has released their disavow link tool, the SEO world is abuzz, and now you’re paranoid, thinking you should do something about it.

So stop worrying, already. You probably don’t need to do anything.

According to Google itself, “The primary purpose of this tool is to help clean up if you’ve hired a bad SEO or made mistakes in your own link-building.”

This sponsorship offer has passed.

But local businesses, look for opportunities like this to get inbound links. Your business benefits, but so do those you support. It’s a win/win.

Here are some search queries to perform to find your own sponsor opportunities:

“become a sponsor”
“donate”
“our supporters”

And if you want to find those sponsorship opportunities in your city simply add + “your city” to those queries.

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You’ve heard it over and over again. You need links on other sites pointing to yours to climb in Google. And that in turn gets you seen and then brings you customers. And you’ve heard SEOs state over and over again that a great way to get those inbound links is by sponsoring a non-profit, an event, or your community’s little league, for example, because typically those organizations will list you as a sponsor on their website along with a link.

Today, I’m offering businesses something much more beneficial than your typical sponsor links.

If you know SEO at all, you know that you can increase the power of your link juice in the following ways:

You do realize it’s not good enough to just write your blog post, don’t you?

Yeah, I know, you just spent an hour researching your analytics to find the best topic to feed the cravings of all those bouncers. And another couple of hours in keyword research and competitive analysis to make sure you have a chance in hell to be found. And then four hours writing the darn thing.

And now you’re tired. Your mind is numb. And you just want to go to bed.

But you’ve really only just begun. You do know that, don’t you?

“Free SEO Friday” audit for Marketing Plan Seminar

How can a local marketing consultant optimize her site to attract more customers and students for her marketing class? This is what I told her.

Normally on FREE SEO Friday at Kat & Mouse’s Facebook Page we do one free site audit, but today I’ve chosen two: Marketing Plan Retreats and Going Green Promos. (Notice how the winners also get an SEO-powerful, inbound link! 🙂

Why two? And why these two that seem so unrelated?

[2014 Addendum – Things have changed since this was written in 2010. Google has come down on blog commenting so if there is any SEO value at all, it’s probably slim. But the advice here is still good. Do as I do and comment in other’s blogs to bring value to what they offer. You’ll build great SUPPORTIVE relationships that way. And you’ll get traffic and business if your comments are smart. I just got 2 new clients last week alone as a result, and one is on the other side of the blog.]

By far the number one thing you can do to increase your position in Google is to get inbound links. There are many ways to do this which I will cover in other blog posts here, but today I want to talk about blog commenting.

Scroll down to the bottom of this blog post and you’ll see a comment box. Not all blogs have these, but most do because most bloggers enjoy getting comments from their readers. Kat’s Meow is a new blog, so there are no comments here yet to see, but if you look at other blogs that have history, chances are you’ll see lots of comments. Notice too that quite often included with those comments is the author’s name and along with that a link to their website. Nice easy way to get a link to your site, isn’t it?